Familiar faces to replace your passwords

IF you are terrible with numbers but never forget a face, your life could be about to get quite a bit easier.

British scientists are planning to replace fiddly passwords and PINs with an access code based on pictures that is almost impossible to forget. This means current frustrations may soon be nothing more than a bad memory.

The Facelock system capitalises on the brain’s excellent face recognition. If we know someone well, then we will recognise them in a photograph even if it is blurred or hazy. But when we see two pictures of a stranger, we often assume that they show two different people.

With this in mind, scientists from the University of Glasgow and the University of York asked volunteers to name Z-list celebrities – people who were familiar to them but who

were not so famous that they would be instantly recognisable to everyone.

The team made panels of nine pictures, each showing one celebrity and eight new faces.

Volunteers were shown four panels and asked to spot the faces they knew. They almost always got all four right.

Even a year later, they did well, journal PeerJ reports.

Scientists said this is because, unlike with passwords and PINs, they did not have to memorise anything. Plus, they did not have to name the faces, just recognise them as being familiar.

Tests also showed it was very hard for strangers to crack the code.

Spouses and siblings sometimes spotted all four faces, but the risk could be cut by using more obscure celebrities. Upping the number of pictures used would also increase the difficulty.

Lead author Dr Rob Jenkins of the University of York said: ‘Pretending to know a face you don’t know is like pretending to know a language you don’t know – it just doesn’t work.

‘The only system that can reliably recognise faces is a human who is familiar with the faces concerned.’

It is now hoped that software companies will build on the research to create photo access codes for computers and mobile phones.